Aesthetica

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discussed in biography

Baumgarten’s most significant work, written in Latin, was
Aesthetica, 2 vol. (1750–58). The problems of aesthetics had been treated by others before Baumgarten, but he both advanced the discussion of such topics as art and beauty and set the discipline off from the rest of philosophy. His student G.F. Meier (1718–77), however, assisted him to such an extent that credit for...

history of art criticism

...Baumgarten created the discipline of aesthetics, giving it a place as a separate philosophical study, and in so doing, afforded new criteria for critical judgment. In his most important work,
Aesthetica (1750–58), he sets forth the difference between a moral and exclusively aesthetic understanding of art, a way of thinking that can be regarded as the major difference between...